Our Target Audience:
Our clients are successful “Baby Boomers” who own one or businesses and are thinking about selling or transitioning their ownership in their business(es). They are experts in their own field of endeavour and not in finance, divestitures, mergers and acquisitions. They focus on results and can become very impatient with prolonged methods and discussion. They are capitalists, often frugal. Independent minded, possibly arrogant. Strong need for control. The best have learned to delegate, but many struggle in this area. As to transactional services, they are focused on the outcome and seldom appreciate the care, diligence and complexity of the processes required to deliver a successful transaction, that is, until they’ve gone through it. They are quite fearful for a number of reasons, including: facing their mortality/limitations, questioning what’s next in life?, maintaining confidentiality, selecting the right firm to handle the process and properly representing their interests, getting value for their money, and usually the fear of change from what is often a major “life-changing” event, and fear of the unknown. They often will confer with, and listen to their spouses discretely/confidentially on important decisions. There is a great deal of risk and time required to engage in this field and our clients are not equipped or prepared to take this on themselves, or feel they will get a better result using experts. They want to choose a firm that they trust will take care of their interests in what is often the largest asset they own. Psycho-graphically, they are hard-driven entrepreneurs with many years of experience, used to making tough decisions and quickly judging character. They will often draw upon a network of contacts to gather knowledge used in their decision-making. They generally have very strong egos, are smart, not easily convinced, and are often domineering. Primarily, the demographic profile is male (and their spouses) aged 40 to 65 and are wealthy or quite “well-to-do”. Primary target geographic market is western and northern Canada, although our work does carry us into all of North America, and occasionally internationally.
Color Preferences:
Colurwise, open to suggestions, but the colours used in our present website are ok, too. Conveying credibility, capability, wealth, energy and trust is paramount.
Our Ideas and Additional Information:
The name "Paladin" means, "To champion a worthy or noble cause by an advocate or defender." We relate to this because we are often handling the sale of a business into which the owner(s) has invested much of their life's work and wealth. Although we relate to this meaning, we have never tested whether our clients explicitly understand this meaning or relationship. When we close the sale of a business we give the owner a very nice and expensive pen to sign the closing documents with and to remember the relationship we had for many months during the process of reaching a final sale. We place our name-logo on the pen. This may influence the size or perhaps other design aspects of the logo. Competition - they are highly professional and well-capitalized groups including the investment arms of banks, various capital advisors, investment bankers, private equity groups, other business intermediaries and business brokers. They generally all use very attractive, professional logos and business images, generally directed at the size of the business.
Where we will use the Design:
Print, Mugs, T-shirts, Web
